Contenu du sommaire : Les ONG

Transnational Non-Governmental Organisations — A German Perspective Political Geography has for a long time been focused on state/governmental actors and territorial questions, often with regard to border-related problems within national contexts (criticized as territorial trap in the international literature).While the growing importance of border-crossing and scale-transcending non-governmental actors has been dealt with in the political and social sciences since the 1990s, it has only recently been given attention by geographers. This paperaims to give evidence of the high spatial relevance of these actors focusing on transnational NGOs, and to inform the French geographic community about the perspectives being developed in Germany. Contours of a Political Geography of civil society as well as processes of spatial change relevant to other sub-disciplines,such as Urban, Economic and Development Geography, are there by out lined. In the first part of the paper general definitions and concepts from the political and social sciences are summarized. In the second part spatially relevant perspectives on transnational civic action are categorized and exemplified.

For more than a decade, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have been studied by the social and political sciences. From a geographic point of view, however, it is surprising that the role of the socio-spatial contextuality of NGO action has not yet been explored in a systematic way. Taking the example of transnational NGOs in Brussels and Geneva, this article contributes to bridging this research gap. By cross-referencing to the global city debate, it is argued that civil society functions are as relevant for the formation of global cities as economic functions. It is also suggested that the role of the socio-spatial context conditions, under which the NGO actors operate, has to be considered in the analysis of NGO influence. On the basis of structuration theories this institutionally dense context is conceptualized as a socio-spatial opportunity structure. Finally, this argumentation is supported by empirical evidence from case studies in the two cities.

The article deals with the structuration of environmental problems in the context of a civil society engagement. This engagement cannot be adequately explained as a simple reaction to environmental burdens in particular places. In particular, this reaction cannot be reduced to questions of redistribution. To comprehend the normative aspects of corresponding cases it is helpful to also investigate the broader struggles for recognition as they have been conceptualized over recent years. A theoretically refined concept of environmental justice can take these dimensions systematically into account. Consequently, the symbolic dimensions of environmental conflicts need to be analysed in more detail. This can be shown with regard to the conflicts around airport noise in the tri-national borderland Switzerland/France/Germany. As a result, we may gain a better understanding of the scales and boundary work in this conflict and, on a more general level, on the politics of scale in struggles over environmental justice.

In the last few years non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become powerful actors influencing not only political decisions on various spatial and political scales, but also the strategic decisions taken by managers of multinational corporations. Although limited in number and restricted by relatively small financial resources, ngos have managed to organize themselves in transnational networks that enable them to exchange information and thereby create knowledge which is used effectively in campaigns against multinational corporations. The following article summarizes the results of a research project which focused on the NGO Coordination Against BAYER-Dangers (CBG) which is linked with numerous actors all over the world that are situated in places where the German chemical enterprise BAYER is either represented by a branch factory or a subcontractor. On the theoretical basis of relevant aspects of network theory and an overview concerning research on knowledge and knowledge transfer, the project was supposed to give answers to questions such as how the different actors in transnational ngo-networks work together. How exactly does the transfer of knowledge among the participants of the network take place and in which way is it modified to become a powerful tool against their opponents ?

Many definitions of risk actually coexist in the literature of the social sciences. In geography, for instance, there is no longer a unique conceptual framework. For the past few years, different methodological approaches have been developed to measure risk. In this article, we argue that risk does not only depend on the geographic and the temporal scale the indicators have been collected but it also depends on the way their spatial dimensions and their territorial impact have been understood. Many geographical studies place the emphasis on environmental factors of risk and their influence on community-based societies. However, this conception of risk leads to a major misunderstanding in food risk analysis : external, apparent and macro-scale risk factors, such as aridity, spatial marginalization and poverty are commonly overvalued in public policy decisions. For these reasons, we think it is important to be careful while consulting thematic maps with indicators of questionable quality. Even if the geographical dimensions of food insecurity are gradually gaining in importance in food alert systems, it nevertheless seems to us that many interventions (by food distribution or food shortage) are still missing a great part of spatial and social heterogeneity and time uncertainty of risk. Hopefully, most NGOs involved in food security and vulnerability programmes rely on micro-level investigation. We argue that it is from now on essential to take in account both the permanent and ambivalent interactions between different local contexts of food production and consumption, human perceptions of risks in particular through multipolar collective family units' decisions.